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Cheating the System: Implanting Links to Raise Page Ranks

Source: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91502-the-invisible-hand/

This segment of a RadioLab episode talks about how order comes about from an undirected group of people. This segment is split into three parts. The first and third parts are interesting, but not immediately applicable to what we’ve been doing in class: the first part is about how the average guesses of a large group of people is far better than any one person’s guess (e.g. if a large population makes guesses about the weight of a cow), and the third part is about the stock market.

However, the most relevant part, the second part, is about searches on Google and how people try to cheat its search system. At first, before Google, it was difficult to find pages on the internet; however, as the episode goes on to explain, Google came up with the clever page rank system that we learned about in class: find the pages that the most other pages link to, properly weighted. (As a side note, RadioLab simplified hub and authority scores into a single credibility score, but the concept is the same.)

Though Google’s search system worked really well on its own, once it became popular, people started to cheat the system. In particular, Steven Johnson, a fairly popular author, owned a website with a comments section in which he started to notice a few odd comments—essentially, spam comments with links to random sites. Although his site was decently popular, he found it particularly odd that random advertisers would spend the time to make these comments on his site, especially since the advertisements were generally about things unrelated to his books; the people on his site would not be the ones inclined to click on these links.

Eventually, he realized that these advertisers were not trying to advertise to the other users of his site, but trying instead to take advantage of the way that Google ranked its pages—even links in the comment section were counted as “endorsements” (to use the terminology we used in class) from his reputable site, so these advertisers were trying to make their own page higher on Google searches by using Steven’s credibility. Implanting links was thus an effective way to cheat Google’s system.

Steven now had three options: to ignore the spam comments, to delete them, or to remove the comment section altogether. Unfortunately, the first was not an option, as some of the comments were quite obscene. The second was far too time-consuming, though he tried to do so at first. Alas, in the end he could only choose to shut down his comments section entirely. Ultimately, neither the advertisers nor Steven got what they actually wanted. Perhaps cheating does not help the advertisers in the end, after all.

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